Businesses today have three compelling reasons to modernize release management.

Organizations must have the capability to:

Streamline multi-application deployment orchestration Companies that invest in automation for deployment and test see enormous gains in both speed and quality. To amplify these benefits, organizations turn to complementary tools to streamline large, multi-application deployments and increase visibility. Release management solutions—even when many deployment activities are yet to be automated—increase release capacity. Release orchestration must be lightweight enough for early environments and sophisticated enough for production. This ensures that critical discoveries made in early integration tests are included in production deployment plans and reduces the number of errors that might otherwise impact customers. Finally, organizations need a streamlined approach that paves the way for variable speed IT, where small, frequent releases are managed alongside large, highly orchestrated releases.

Visualize project and application dependencies As development organizations shift from large, infrequent releases to smaller, more frequent ones, the risk associated with any given release is substantially reduced. While the decreased risk is important, the increased number of releases introduces new challenges, such as scheduling around environment and resource constraints and balancing volumes. Release management must ensure that a coherent set of capabilities is released when a single business project changes multiple applications, each of which might have dependencies with other systems.

Automate quality-based code promotion For most development organizations, the testing pipeline includes four to eight environments that are used during software’s journey toward production. While teams along the pipeline wait for handoff, delays are imposed that unnecessarily lengthen development time. To shorten cycles and speed troubleshooting, teams need to increase visibility and reduce friction at every stage along the pipeline. This combination provides release management and operations teams the earliest possible view of content headed toward production.

Large releases are labor-intensive and challenging for all stakeholders. The challenges affect all types of organizations—healthcare, hospitality, hightech, telecom, financial, and government agencies—and underscore the need for better tools and management practices. To increase release capacity, development teams and the release management teams that support them need new approaches and tools.

The enterprises that are leading DevOps transformations are:

Streamlining planning for major release events, leveraging a more collaborative approach and intelligent tooling that aids the assembly of deployment plans based on knowledge of past deployments, participating applications and target environments.

Executing major release events with realtime understanding of release statuses throughout the event, so that manual and automated elements are completed with less delay, less time spent online, or on conference calls, and with a clear picture of the overall progress.

Transitioning content to smaller, more frequent releases and moving away from the complexities, risks, and delays associated with overloaded, bundled releases.